The Baobab Cultural Center, a nexus of Rochester's black community and a well regarded art gallery on University Avenue, will close unless it can raise $10,000 by the end of the year, Director Terry Chaka said.

A fundraiser is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. Friday, with a suggested minimum donation of $10. On Saturday there will be a Kwanzaa marketplace event from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.

There is also a GoFundMe page that had raised $1,300 as of Wednesday morning.

The center, founded in 2005, is currently operating with essentially no paid staff and a nearly empty bank account, Chaka said.

"We really need the basic, basic funding in order to be able to function," she said. "I've essentially been volunteering. ... There are a lot of things we could be doing, but I can't do it because I'm worrying about negotiating with RG&E and what not."

In the past several years, Baobab has used grant funding to put on large-scale exhibits, including Barakoa, a project centering on African masks, and Magnificent Africa, an interactive educational program about the African diaspora that drew thousands of Rochester City School District students.

Those grants, however, don't provide much support for basic operational costs, which Chaka said amount to at least $100,000 a year. And the part-time staff person who obtained the grant funding and generally handled the finances left the center 18 months ago.

"The past year and a half I’ve been trying to sail this boat myself," she said.

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Terry Chaka(Photo: 2009 file photo)

Besides its gallery of work from black artists and its major projects, Baobab has regular film screenings, African history courses and yoga, among other things, and its space on University Avenue isn't large enough to accommodate it all. The center no longer has regular opening hours because Chaka isn't always available to be there.

If it can get the money, the center is considering a program on what Chaka called "culinary injustice," or how people from the African diaspora have been dispossessed of their culinary heritage and made dependent on big agribusiness. It also recognizes the rising demand for workshops on cultural competency and believes it could help fill the need.

"I see the center as a place where we tell our own stories," Chaka said. "It's a very key time for us to be able to do that, because we give the history behind things. ... We have a lot of ideas we want to put in place, but we're kind of at a stand-still."

Simeon Banister, a member of the Rush-Henrietta school board, volunteers at Baobab and says he believes it can serve as the cornerstone for anti-racism and cultural competency training, particularly for children.

"We all saw what happened, for instance, in Spencerport during the Urban-Suburban discussion, and several school districts are really starting to advance cultural competency as district priorities," he said. "People are talking about the causes of structural racism — that’s what happens at Baobab, is people are educated about the actual history of what happened."